A jury has found that in using Linux on its back-end servers, Google has infringed a patent held by a small Texas-based company and must pay $5m in damages.
In 2006, Bedrock Computer Technologies sued Google and several other outfits – including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, PayPal, and AOL – claiming they infringed on a patent filed in …

COMMENTS

Page:

Prior art

DB2 used linked lists for db storage if I remember rightly. Must have had methods to count and remove records and indexes into the list, too.

I was using DB2 years before 1997.

If we're lucky the trolls' twisted corpses will be dug up in a few years next time the Information Super Highway is resurfaced. Why proof that you applied your patent to an invention or product isn't required I'll never know. Oh, actually I do. It's cos it's 'merrika

Maybe, maybe not...

DB2 isn't an OS.

Unless you can see the patent in its entirety, it is difficult to decide.

Again the burden is to disprove the patent outside of the lawsuit which can be expensive an if you're not successful you just wasted a lot of good money and also set up a precedence which will make it harder to fight the patent in a different lawsuit.

Without passing judgment on this specific case, once again the USPTO is flawed when it gave out software patents along with business process patents.

Who owns the patent?

Bedrock appears to have bought it from the inventor, a CS professor in New York. Bedrock is a troll -- they have no product, no research and no customers. Their business is buying patents and using them as a basis for lawsuits.

g e is right

This sounds like DB2's b-tree balancing. Does this patent take ownership of b-trees andlinked list data structures?

This whole copyright thing has gone to hell on a horse, I bought a section of bedding plants last week, on the back of the tag "Protected by plant breeders rights. Propagation prohibited without a license" and a (c)HORTIPAK LTD

Like Bill Gates said...

If it wasn't big blue

Think of IBM, a small country sized company. In 80s, they were 10x more influential especially in government. I heard at one stage, USA govt. decided to sue them and they figured IBM has more lawyers than the government itself.

So, MS bought the CP/M copy to sell it to big blue. I bet if it wasn't IBM, a smaller company, they wouldn't start the company and BillG's rich family would have to pay some huge money.

Re: If it wasn't big blue?

>>So, MS bought the CP/M copy to sell it to big blue. I bet if it wasn't IBM, a smaller company, they wouldn't start the company and BillG's rich family would have to pay some huge money.<<

Gates was selling BASIC for the microcomputer to the Fortune 500 in 1975.

MBASIC would go on to become the first million-dollar software seller for the micro.

In 1980 Microsoft had a full suite of programming languages, a UNIX port for the micro in development, the Z-80 Softcard for the Apple II - and was beginning to move into both the consumer and business markets for applications.

IBM came to Microsoft for both programming languages and OS for their new micro and it was Gates who pointed them towards Digital Research.

When DR fumbled the ball, Gates was there to pick it up.

Promising to deliver a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC --- at the low, low, price of $50 a unit, retail list.

No probably about it.

If you knew anything at all about programming, the lawyers could exclude you from the jury because you are liable to have pre-determined opinions about the case law and therefore favor one of the parties over the other.

Re: Ummm...

@ Steven Knox... Nope. Not a Troll.

Simple fact is Google, Apple, M$ et al. have spent millions patenting finger swipes over capacitive surfaces, shapes of iGadgets and even page turning on e-readers. Why? Because the system lets them! They are trying to crate up ideas and concepts where the patent system was designed to protect inventions like the telephone, automatic transmissions or microwave ovens.

So when someone sues Google for such a patent violation I just laugh quietly to myself as this is them being hoisted on their own petard. The corporations created this beast and if it turns and bites them on occasion then all the better motivation to fix the bloody system.

The patent system is broken everywhere Mr. Knox; not just Texas. Have a nice day.

Software patents are crazy

Guess the Americans are learning this, like so much else, the hard way.

"The jury found that Google did not provide by a "preponderance of evidence" that these clams were invalid." - wtf? Does this seem ridiculous to anyone else: you have to prove you *didn't* infringe on a patent?

- is this specific to the Texan legal jurisdiction?

- cannot this be used as a means to discover how your competitor is doing a task just by claiming it must infringe on your patent?

- given the burden of proof, what is there to stop creating frivolous lawsuits, regardless of the size of your company, just to harass your competitors?

No wonder US lawyers are the most competitive and best paid in the world. It must seem to them the entire world is their oyster ...

When did this get introduced into the Kernel?

So what we have is a patent on...

... using a hash (globally unique identifier, or GUID) as a search key to identify a specific linked list, which contains a set of records, in which said records contain time-stamp/expiry information, and a collision detection algorithm thrown-in to make sure conflicting updates are not made on the linked list.

This is utter bollocks.

How to manage linked lists is part of Programming 101 (Structured Programming), using a unique key to identify a set of structured data is part of Programming 201 (Relational Database Management and Design), and collision detection and avoidance of simultaneous updates on a specific chunk of data is part of Programming 301 (Parallel/Threaded Programming).

Just about every operating system and relational database management system makes congruent use of all three methods; here are just a few that come quickly to mind:

**Note: I am not against patents per se, as long as couple conditions are met:

-- Patent holders should be required to produce an actual product based upon their patents within X years of initial award (4 to 7 years to allow for commercial development seems fair; maybe a bit longer in the case of medicines that are stuck in double-blind-study-limbo by government drug safety authorities), otherwise the patent enters the public domain. ("Put up or shut up.")

-- Patents on software which provides general methods of manipulating data in various ways should be invalidated; after all, that's what general-purpose computers (and the apps that run on them) are designed to do. ("How I arrange my LEGOs is my business.")

Ultimate bogosity

Got y'all beat

I was using linked lists with hash tables and garbage collection to store plant-floor test data on an emissions-related part that had to be available to the EPA back in thee 1970's and it was old stuff then.

Paris - because when she drove through East Texas the average IQ of the state doubled.

Holding head in hands

The bullet points listing the infringements describe a linked list and the operations one might want to perform on it as far as I can tell. I learned linked lists in 1991 in a Pascal programming class at Uni, they were hardly new then. Where is the new art in the patent?

Now if the patent holder had a way to search a linked list without using a key value, or to delete entries without using a key value then the patent holder would have something!